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First try, front-end submissions with Caldera Forms – plus a review

You know those times you spend hours trying to solve a problem, then finally swallow your pride and ask for help, only to figure out a solution 10 minutes after asking? Yeah, screw you those times. Well not really. Actually, my recent adventure was a great learning experience for me the other day when I saved a ton of time with Caldera Forms.

Remember that front-end posting of Testimonials by WooThemes plugin I made public on GitHub? I spent 6+ hours working on that plugin, after days of work exploring CMB2 for another project. Just to be clear, I absolutely LOVE CMB2. But for something like this, my plugin probably isn’t the best solution, or at least isn’t the only solution to my problem.

I’ve been continuing my obsession with front end posting, editing, etc., and found myself finally giving Caldera Forms a try after a quick Twitter exchange with Jesse Petersen.

I don’t mind being boxed into WordPress as a niche, but going to explore more plugins for projects. Checking out @CalderaWP.

I’m regularly a Gravity Forms user, but have also used Ninja Forms and Formidable Pro. All are great plugins, and powerful in their own way. As a front end developer (mostly), I get frustrated with the styling of Gravity Forms. Ninja/Formidable just never felt right, as far as the backend UI. I don’t love Gravity Forms UI either, but I stick with it since it’s so widely used.

The new kid (form builder) on the block

Josh Pollock is one of the main guys (or THE main guy?) behind CalderaWP. I’ve known of Josh for a few years from the PODS world. That alone gave me a bit of security in trusting his products.

Setting up a simple form was just that, simple. The UI made sense to me. It was clean and clear. Great. Ajax submissions worked like a charm. Removing default styling for the form and the layout was a piece of cake.. nice touch!

Front-end submissions

Disclaimer: I’m really into front-end submissions of CPT’s lately. It’s fitting for a lot of projects I’m working on currently.

I already have my working front end submission plugin I mentioned earlier, so I knew the post_type, and custom field keys that I needed to submit a new testimonial from the front end.

I added a few new fields, set the slugs to the field keys I wanted, then I added the custom fields save to post type processor, which is part of the free Caldera Custom Fields add-on to ‘map’ my fields accordingly. Simple and fast. Seriously.

That’s literally it. I put the form on a page and it’s basically magic.

The same thing that took me countless hours previously, I was now able to setup in 10 minutes. And it was the first time I have ever seen Caldera forms in the WordPress backend.

I’ve made it really simple for you as well. Here is an export file of my form. Download it, and import into Caldera Forms on your WordPress site.

This is not to say I’m fully a convert, it takes me a while to fully commit to things… but I’m certainly going to keep playing with Caldera Forms.

What’s next for Caldera Forms?

In my early stages of testing, the next thing I’d like to see built for Caldera Forms is a solid UI for editing profiles, with custom user meta field support. Since I was so happy with my initial use of Caldera Forms, I already purchased the Users for Caldera Forms add-on. This is a cool add-on for custom login and registration forms, but it doesn’t currently do profile editing. I look forward to the addition of this feature (if it’s coming at all).

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Comments

Mike, I can’t tell you how happy I am to read that you are interested in front end submissions! The WP community needs so much more attention paid to front end editing and front end submission/editing!

I’ve used Gravity and it wasn’t for me. Love Formidable and their awesome tech support but it wasn’t exactly designed for what I wanted to do just then. Found Toolset and love it but often would like a lighter weight option.

Does Caldera offer any way for users to edit their submissions? The WP backend is no place for “normal” people. How about arranging the data submitted? Still have to do that in php?

Just subscribed and am hoping to hear more from you about front end submissions!

Yeah, Caldera’s free Custom Fields add-on adds support for front end posting and editing. If you put the form on your single post/page you can choose to show it to only logged in post authors, or whatever you want. You can also get tricky and do something with Sidr (or other) like this, but with Caldera instead of ACF.http://thestizmedia.com/front-end-post-editing-with-acf-pro/

Hi Mike,
Thanks for the guide. I am using Formidable Forms for all of my forms solution so far but when it come to front-end posting, it doesn’t feel right for me. I just tried Caldera Forms as your recommendation and start falling in love with now.
I have a question, hope you can help: I use Caldera Forms as a front-end solution for my customer to send their price inquiry. It will create a new custom post type for each inquiry. How can I redirect the customer to the new inquiry post that created based on their submission. I don’t know what value to put in the Redirect box in the Processor.

Hey Thuan, glad you liked the tutorial.. thanks for stopping by! Caldera Forms makes redirects really easy as well.
1. When you’re editing your form, click the ‘Processors’ button to get the page where you created your fields to post settings.
2: Add a new processor and choose ‘Redirect’.
3: For the URL, click the little brackets icon in the right side of the URL field, and scroll to the section that has your ‘Save as Post Type’ heading and choose {post_type:permalink:}. There will probably be a string of letters/numbers in it as well.
4: Select that one and update your form.

Now, on post submission it should redirect to the permalink (URL) of the new post.

Thanks Mike for the guide. It works as I expect now. So much easier than Formidable Pro. I will spend more time learning Caldera Forms, still many functionality that I don’t understand yet. It looks promising.

WordPress website using Avada theme, all current versions. I’m trying to enable an input mask on a single line of text, and not having any luck. I want the field to be alphanumeric, with up to 35 characters, including spaces, i.e., any characters. This will be a short sentence field. [*{35}] gives me the correct 35 spaces that is alphanumeric, but does not allow spaces/punctuation. I want the field to stop allowing any more text input after the 35th character has been typed. I’m thinking that somehow I should be using \s or \w or the dot/period, but so far nothing has worked. Can you shed any light on this or point me in a direction? I’m not a developer or coder, so ajax and jQuery are above me at this point… :-\ but I’m willing to learn if there are dummy/idiot tutorials 😉 I am a better visual learner, so YouTube would be great, but I haven’t found what I need – probably not doing the correct search. I am on a couple of Facebook WP groups, but no luck with this issue yet. Not sure if there are any WP Caldera Forms groups on FB? Thanks for any help!

Well, I visited the caldera forms website on the back of your article and tried to send them a presales question asking about capabilities….and their contact forms is broken. No matter what I write as an email address I get the message “The email parameter should include an email, euid, or leid key”

Not reassuring. It’s not possible to ask anything in their support forum without having paid for products so they are in effect unreachable… and who pays for a product when they have no confidence that anybody ever answers emails?

Hi Brian, so sorry to hear that. I just tested a pre sales submission on their website and it worked fine. Josh and David (from Caldera) are both really great guys and their products are top notch. I’m not sure what that error was from, but I’ll let them know you had an issue. Thanks for posting back here though.

The current version of Caldera Custom Fields says that you can edit posts now. But I didn’t manage to make it work, have you tried it? Could you advise how to set it up?
I tried to find documentation but couldn’t find any.

I’ve installed Caldera after having been a Gravity Forms user for about 5 years. I got tried of paying the fees every year. I love the look of Caldera, but I currently can launch a site do the fact I can’t get the redirect to work. Josh looked at it yesterday and it was definitely acting weird, and to remove on of the requirements. That didn’t work and I’ve heard nothing since.

I’ve just looked and Ninja and it looks about the same as Gravity. If I don’t hear anything by the end of the day as a fix to this I’m going to have to go with Ninja.

Redirects should be pretty straightforward, but it sounds like you’re trying to do something a little trickier i’m guessing. If Josh is helping then he’ll probably get you going. Ninja Forms is a great plugin as well. 3.0 is about to launch too, and it’s reeeeaaallly slick looking 😉

“The email parameter should include an email, euid, or leid key” – I’m getting the same response with my caldera form on my website at the moment. It worked fine up until earlier today and now not anymore.

I also agree with the previous poster and find it highly frustrating that I cannot contact anyone from caldera.
I agree the setup is convenient, but there are bugs, no documentation on how to set up certain add ons and no one to contact.

Just about a month or so ago I was introduced to Caldera and I have NOT regreted it. It is a FANTASTIC piece of software. I have looked at Ninja and Gravity and found them more cumbersome than Caldera.

Some people have spoken of poor customer service, Josh has responded to my emails within 24 hours. Try that with CF7, their support is no existant. With CF7 If you do have a problem (if and when they respond) the solution is always Custom CSS code. Yuk…

I have spent time with the math, conditions and the other features within Caldera and have only found some cosmetic type of issues. I have reported these and according to Josh will be addressed in the next release (which is due shortly).

Lets be practical, no software will be suitable for everyones needs. For me, Caldera is the way to go.

Bit late to the party, but has something changed with the redirect processor? I’m trying to redirect the user to their post after they have clicked submit, but just getting redirected to a no content found page.

So tried adding to the redirect processor, {date:Y/m/d}/%title%/ but that gives mehttp://localhost/mysite/submit-article/2017/06/03/Some new story here Part 2/?cf_id=85
With this one, I can replace the spaces with hyphens in the “/Some new story here Part 2/” part of the url and it will take me to the correct post.